With respect to human-machine interaction, mobile phones (using a wireless telephone network) are by their very nature a dramatic improvement over landline phones; a mobile phone obviously imposes fewer limitations on a user than a landline phone does, enabling more natural and expressive communication because the machine interface is almost not noticed. The mobile phone industry strives constantly to make using a mobile phone an even more natural and complete communication experience.
Therefore, many mobile phones today offer modes of expression not usually found in landline phones. For example, many mobile phones today include small video displays and offer communication via pictures (for example of cartoon-like drawings or logos) and associated text presented on the displays. Thus, the sense of sight is engaged by mobile phones. And of course mobile phones, like landline phones, also engage the sense of hearing.
NTT DoCoMo has an email service called Paldio Email.
Panasonic has made phones (models 623p and 632p) that have a feature called BeatMelody (see http://www.mci.panasonic.co.jp/pcd/623p/beatmelody/index.html, a Japanese language website), which apparently allows a user to attach simple vibration patterns to email. It is believed by the inventors that the Panasonic phones use the NTT DoCoMo Paldio email service to deliver the vibrations.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,028,531 (the '531 patent) to Wanderlich for Terminal Units for a Mobile Communication System introduces devices that can be used for sending and receiving different kinds of vibration patterns for interpersonal communication; see especially column 6, line 52 to column 7, line 44. The '531 patent also discloses various types of vibratable devices, including a personal vibrator of the type used on a human body with a user engaging portion that may comprise a smooth-ended rod, a smooth plug, or a vibratory aperture.
A patent application having Ser. No. 09/717,862, assigned to the present assignee, with a date of priority of Nov. 26, 1999, having Sami Ronkainen as the sole inventor, discloses tactile feedback, using vibration, as part of a phone user interface. The disclosure also introduces a new way of using a vibration motor included in mobile phones for alerting a user of the mobile phone to an incoming call or a message, such as a message conveyed by the so-called short message service (SMS).
As far as the inventors are aware, the vibrating Panasonic mobile phones have only a few different vibration patterns, which have no logical or associated meaning. The same is true of the vibrating mobile phones disclosed in the '531 patent. The vibrations there are mathematically generated by systematically varying amplitude, frequency and duration of vibration of a vibrator; in addition, the communication of such vibration patterns is done with paging systems, not with smarter (full) mobile communication systems such as mobile communication systems according to the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM).
In Sami Ronkainen's invention, the vibrations have associated meanings, but the meanings are associated only with the user interface of the mobile phone. According to the invention disclosed there, a user can choose different vibration patterns for different callers, but there is no suggestion of sending vibration patterns as a means of communicating a message to the user of the receiving mobile phone.
What is therefore needed in mobile phones, besides a way to engage the senses of sight and hearing, as described above, is also a way to engage the sense of touch, not simply as it is engaged in holding a mobile phone, but as part of the communication experience, i.e. in communicating a message to the user of a receiving mobile phone.